CHAPTER X.
“The snowOf her sweet coldness hath extinguished quiteThe fire that but even now began to flame.”
“The snowOf her sweet coldness hath extinguished quiteThe fire that but even now began to flame.”
“The snowOf her sweet coldness hath extinguished quiteThe fire that but even now began to flame.”
“The snow
Of her sweet coldness hath extinguished quite
The fire that but even now began to flame.”
Theodore Dalbrook, a sensible, hard-headed man of business, was like a puppet in his cousin’s hands. She told him to toil for her, and he deemed himself privileged to be allowed so to labour. She put him upon that which, according to his own conviction, was an absolutely false track, and he was compelled to follow it. She bade him think with her thoughts, and he bent his mind to hers.
Yes, she was right perhaps. It was a vendetta. Lord Cheriton had lived all these years hemmed round with unseen, unsuspected foes. They had not burned his ricks, or tried to burn his dwelling-house; they had not slandered him to the neighbourhood in anonymous letters; they had not poisoned his dogs or his pheasants. Such petty malevolence had been too insignificant for them. But they had waited till his fortunes had reached their apogee, till his only child had grown from bud to flower and he had wedded her to an estimable young man of patrician lineage and irreproachable character. And, just when fate was fairest the cowardly blow had been struck—a blow that blighted one young life, and darkened those two other lives sloping towards the grave, the lives of father and mother, rendered desolate because of their daughter’s desolation.
Mastered by that will which was his law, the will of the woman he loved, Theodore began to believe as she believed, or at least to think it just possible that there might be amongst the remnant of the Strangway race a man so lost and perverted, so soured by poverty, so envenomed by disgraces and mortifications, eating slowly into the angry heart, like rust into iron, that he had become at last the very incarnation of malignity—hating the man who had prospered while he had failed, hating the owner of his people’s forfeited estate as if that owner had robbed them of it—hating with so passionate amalevolence that nothing less than murder could appease his wrath. Yes, there might be such a man. In the history of mankind there have been such crimes. They are not common in England, happily; but among the Celtic nations they are not uncommon.
“My first brief,” mused Theodore, with a grim smile, as he walked up and down the drawing-room while his cousin was writing a memorandum requesting the bailiff’s presence. “It is more like a case entrusted to a detective than submitted to counsel’s opinion; but it will serve to occupy my mind while I am eating my dinners. My poor Juanita! Will her loss seem less, I wonder, when she has discovered the hand that widowed her?”
He dined with his cousin at a small round table in the spacious dining-room which had held so many cheerful gatherings in the years that were gone: the sisters and their husbands, and the sisters’ friends; and Godfrey’s college friends; and those old friends of the neighbourhood who seemed only a little less than kindred, by reason of his having known them all his life. And now these two were sitting here alone, and the corners of the room were full of shadows. One large circular lamp suspended over the table was the only light, the carving being done in a serving-room adjoining.
Juanita was too hospitable to allow the meal to be silent or gloomy. She put aside the burden of her grief and talked to her cousin of his family and of his own prospects; and she seemed warmly interested in his future success. It was but a sisterly interest, he knew, frankly expressed as a sister’s might have been; yet it was sweet to him nevertheless, and he talked freely of his plans and hopes.
“I felt stifled in that old street,” he told her. “A man must be very happy to endure life in a country town.”
“But you are not unhappy, Theodore?” she interrupted, wonderingly.
“Unhappy—no, that would be too much to say, perhaps. You know how fond I am of my father. I was glad to work with him, and to feel that I was useful to him; but that feeling was not enough to reconcile me to the monotony of my days. A man who has home ties—a wife and children—may be satisfied in that narrow circle; but for a young man with his life before him it is no better than a prison.”
“I understand,” said Juanita, eagerly. “I can fully sympathize with you. I am very glad you are ambitious, Theodore. A man is worthless who is without ambition. And now tell me what you will do when you go to London. How will you begin?”
“I shall put up at the Inns of Court Hotel for a few days while I look about for a suitable set of chambers, and when I have found them and furnished them, and brought my books and belongings from Dorchester, I shall sit down and read law. I can read while I am qualifying for the Bar. I shall go on reading after I have qualified. My life will be to sit in chambers and read law books untilsome one brings me business. It hardly sounds like a brilliant career, does it?”
“All beginnings are hard,” she answered, gently. “I suppose my father went through just the same kind of drudgery when he began?”
“Well, yes, he must have gone upon the same lines, I fancy. There is no royal road.”
“And while you are studying law and waiting for briefs, will you have time to look after my interests?”
“Yes, Juanita. Your interest shall be my first thought always. If it can make you happier to discover your husband’s murderer——”
“Happier! It is the only thing that can reconcile me to the burden of living.”
“If it is for your happiness, you need not fear that I shall ever relax in my endeavours. I may fail,—indeed, I fear I must fail,—but it shall not be for the lack of earnestness or perseverance.”
“I knew that you would help me,” she said, fervently, holding out her hand to him across the table.
Dinner was over, and they were alone, with the grapes and peaches of the Priory hothouses, which were not even second to those of Cheriton, unheeded upon the table before them.
“Blake is in the house by this time, I dare say,” said Juanita presently. “Would you like to see him here, and shall I stay, or would you rather talk to him alone?”
“I had better take him in hand alone. It is always hard work to get straight answers out of that sort of man, and any cross current distracts him. His thoughts are always ready to go off at a tangent.”
“He knows all about the Squire’s children. He can give you any particulars you want about them.”
The butler came into the room five minutes afterwards with the coffee, and announced the bailiff’s arrival.
Juanita rose at once, and left her cousin to receive Jasper Blake alone.
He came into the room with rather a sheepish air. He was about sixty, young looking for his age, with a bald forehead, and stubbly iron grey hair, and a little bit of whisker on each sunburnt cheek. He had the horsey look still, though he had long ceased to have anything to do with horses beyond buying and selling cart-horses for the home farm, and occasionally exhibiting a prize animal in that line. He was a useful servant, and a thoroughly honest man, of the old-fashioned order.
“Mr. Blake, I want you to give me some information about old friends of yours. I have a little business in hand, which indirectly concerns the Strangway family, and I want to be quite clear in my own mind as to how many are left of them, and where they are to be found.”
The bailiff rubbed one of his stunted whiskers meditatively, and shook his head.
“There was never many of ’em to leave, sir,” he said, grumpily, “and I don’t believe there’s any of ’em left anywheres. There seems to have been a curse upon ’em, for the last hundred years. Nothing ever throve with them. Look at what Cheriton is now, and what it was in their time.”
“I didn’t know it in their time, Mr. Blake.”
“Ah, you’re not old enough; but your father knew the place. He did business for the old Squire—till things got too bad—mortgages, and accommodation bills, and overdrawn accounts at the bank, and such like, and your father washed his hands of the business—a long-headed gentleman, your father. He can tell you what Cheriton was like in the Squire’s time.”
“Why do you suppose the Strangways are all dead and gone?”
“Well, sir, first and foremost it’s fifteen years and more since I’ve heard of any of ’em, and the last I heard was about as bad as bad could be.”
“What was that last report?”
“It was about Master Reginald—that was the eldest son, him that was colonel of a Lancer regiment, and married Lord Dangerfield’s youngest daughter. I remember the bonfires on the hills out by Studlands just as if it happened yesterday, but it’s more than forty years ago, and I was a boy in the stables at fourteen shillings a week.”
“Reginald, the elder son, colonel of Lancers, married Lord Dangerfield’s daughter—about 1840,” wrote Theodore in a pocket-book which he held ready for taking notes.
“What was it you heard about him?” he asked.
“Well, sir, it was Mr. de Lacy’s servant that told me. He’d been somewhere in the south with his master where there was gambling—a place where the folks make a regular trade of it. It’s a wonderful climate, says Mr. de Lacy’s man, and the gentry go there for their health, and very often finish by shooting themselves, and it seems Colonel Strangway was there. He’d come over from Corsica, which it seems was in the neighbourhood—where he’d left his poor wife all among brigands and savages—and he was at the tables day and night, and he had a wonderful run of luck, so that they called him the king of the place, and it was who but he? Howsoever the tide turned suddenly, and he began losing, and he lost his last sixpence, in a manner of speaking regular cleaned out, Mr. de Lacy’s man said; and by-and-by there comes another gentleman, a Jewish gentleman from Paris, rolling in money, and playing for the sake of the science, and able to hold out where another man must have given in; and in a week or twohewas the king of the place, and the Colonel was nowhere, just living on tick at the hotel, and borrowing a fiver from Mr. de Lacy or any other old acquaintancewhenever he had the chance, and making as much play as he could with two or three cart wheels, where he used to play with hundred-franc pieces. And so it went on, and he cut up uncommon rough when anybody happened to offend him, and there was more than one row at the hotel or in the gardens—they don’t allow no rows in the gambling rooms,—and just as the season was coming to an end the Colonel went off one afternoon to catch the boat for Corsica. The boat was to start after dark from Nice, and there was a lot of traffic in the port, but not as much light as there ought to have been, and the Colonel missed his footing in going from the quay to the boat, and went to the bottom like a plummet. Some people thought he made away with himself on purpose, and that the one sensible thing he did was to make it look like accident, so as not to vitiate the insurance on his life, which Lord Dangerfield had taken care of, and had paid the premiums ever since the Colonel began to go to the bad. Anyhow, he never came up again alive out of that water. His death was published in the papers: ‘Accidentally drowned at Nice.’ I should never have known the rights or the wrongs of it if Mr. de Lacy hadn’t happened to be visiting here soon afterwards.”
“Did Colonel Strangway leave no children?”
“Neither chick nor child.”
“Do you know if his widow is still living?”
“No, sir. That is the last I ever heard of him or his.”
“What about the younger brother?”
“I believe he must be dead too, though I can’t give you chapter and verse. He never married, didn’t Mr. Frederick—not to my knowledge. He went on board a man-of-war before he was fifteen, and at five and twenty he was a splendid officer and as fine a young man as you need wish to see; but he was too fond of the bottle. China was the ruin of him, some folks said, and he got court-marshalled out there, not long after they sacked that there Summer Palace there was so much talk about; and then he contrived to pass into the mercantile marine, which was a come-down for a Strangway, and for a few years he was one of their finest officers, a regular dare-devil; could sail a ship faster and safer than any man in the service; used to race home with the spring pickings of tea, when tea wasn’t the cheap muck it is now, and when there weren’t no Suez Canal to spoil sport. But he took to his old games again, and he got broke again, broke for drunkenness and insubordination; and then he went and loafed and drank in Jersey—where, it’s my belief, he died some years ago.”
“You have no positive information about his death?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“There was one daughter, I think?”
“Yes, there was a daughter, Miss Eva. I taught her to ride. There wasn’t a finer horsewoman in Dorsetshire, but a devil of a temper—the real Strangway temper. I wasn’t surprised when Iheard she’d married badly; I wasn’t surprised when I heard she’d run away from her husband.”
“Did she leave any children?”
“No, not by him.”
“But afterwards—do you know if there were children?”
“I can’t say that I do. She was living in Boulogne when I last heard of her, and somebody told me afterwards that she died there.”
“That’s vague. She may be living still.”
“I don’t think that’s likely. It’s more than ten years—ay, it’s nearer fifteen—since I heard of her death. She was not the kind of woman to hide her light under a bushel for a quarter of a century. If she were alive I feel sure we should have heard of her at Cheriton. Lord! how fond she was of the place, and how proud she was of her good looks and her old name, and how haughty and overbearing she was with every other young woman that ever came in her way.”
“She must have been a remarkably disagreeable young person, I take it.”
“Well, not altogether, sir. She had a taking way when she wasn’t in her tantrums, and she was very good to the poor people about Cheriton.Theydoated upon her. She never quarrelled with them. It was with her father she got on worst. Those two never could hit it off. They were too much alike. And at last, when she was close upon seventeen, and a regular clipper, things got so bad that the Squire packed off the governess at an hour’s warning. She was too young and silly to manage such a pupil as Miss Strangway, and it’s my belief she sided with her in all her mischief, and made things worse. He turned her out of doors neck and crop, and a week afterwards he took his daughter up to London and handed her over to an English lady, who kept a finishing school somewhere abroad, at a place called Losun.”
“At Lausanne, I think.”
“Yes, that was the name. She was to stay there for a year, and then she was to have another year’s schooling in Paris to finish her; but she never got to Paris, didn’t Miss Eva. She ran off from Lausanne with a lieutenant in a marching regiment, and her father never saw her face again. He had no money to give her if she had married ever so well, but he took a pride in striking her name out of his will all the same.”
“What was her husband’s name?”
“Darcy—Tom Darcy. He was an Irishman, and I’ve heard he treated her very badly.”
“Do you know how long it was after her marriage that she left him?”
“I only know when I heard they were parted, and that was six or seven years after she ran away from Lausanne.”
“How long was that before the Squire’s death and the sale of the estate?”
“Nearly ten years, I should say.”
“That makes it about thirty-four years ago?”
“Yes, that’s about it.”
Theodore noted down the date in his book. He had heard all these things before now—loosely, and in a disjointed fashion—never having been keenly interested in the vicissitudes of the Strangways.
“Who was the man who took her away from her husband?”
“God knows,” said Jasper. “None of us at Cheriton ever heard. We fancied he must have been a Frenchman, for she was heard of afterwards—a good many years afterwards—at Boulogne. Our old Vicar saw her there the year before he died—it must have been as late as sixty-four or sixty-five, I fancy,—a wreck, he said. He wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t spoken to him, and she had to tell him who she was. I heard him tell my old master all about it, one summer afternoon at the Vicarage gate, when Sir Godfrey had driven over to see him. Yes, it must have been as late as sixty-five, I believe.”
“Five years after Lord Cheriton bought the estate?”
“About that.”
“Do you remember the name of Miss Strangway’s governess? Of course, you do, though.”
The bailiff rubbed his iron-grey whisker with a puzzled air.
“My memory’s got to be like a corn-sieve of late years,” he said, “but I ought to remember her name. She was at Cheriton over four years, and I only wish I had a guinea for every time I’ve sat behind her and Miss Strangway in the pony chaise. She was a light-hearted, good-tempered young woman, but she hadn’t bone enough for her work. She wasn’t up to Miss Strangway’s weight. Let me see now—what was that young woman’s name?—she was a good-looking girl, sandy, with a high colour and a freckled skin. I ought to remember.”
“Take a glass of claret, Mr. Blake, and take your time. The name will come back to you. Have you ever heard of the lady since she left Cheriton?”
“Never—she wasn’t likely to come back to this part of the world after having been turned out neck and crop, as she was. What was the name of the man who saw the apple fall?—Newton—that was it, Sarah Newton. Miss Strangway used to call her Sally. I remember that.”
“Do you know where she came from, or what her people were?”
“She came from somewhere near London, and it’s my opinion her father kept a shop; but she was very close about her home and her relatives.”
“And she was young, you say?”
“Much too young for the place. She couldn’t have been five and twenty when she left; and a girl like Miss Strangway, a motherless girl, wanted some one older and wiser to keep her in order.”
“Had the Squire’s wife been long dead at that time?”
“She died before I went to service at Cheriton. Miss Eva couldn’t have been much above seven years old when she lost her mother.”
Theodore asked no more questions, not seeing his way to extracting any further information from the bailiff. He had been acquainted with most of these facts before, or had heard them talked about. The handsome daughter who ran away from a foreign school with a penniless subaltern—the Strangway temper, and the pitched battles between the spendthrift father and the motherless unmanageable girl—the life-long breach, and then a life of poverty and an untimely death in a strange city, only vaguely known, yet put forward as a positive and established fact. He had heard all this: but the old servant’s recollections helped him to tabulate his facts—helped him, too, with the name of the governess, which might be of some use in enabling him to trace the story of the last of the Strangways.
“If there is any ground for Juanita’s theory, I think the man most likely to have done the deed would be the Colonel of Lancers, supposed to be drowned at Nice. If I were by any means to discover that the story of the drowning was a mistake, and that the Colonel is in the land of the living, I should be inclined to adopt Juanita’s view of the murder.”
He encouraged the bailiff to take a second glass of claret, and talked over local interests with him for ten minutes or so, while his dog-cart was being brought round; and then, Mr. Blake having withdrawn, he went to the drawing-room where Juanita was sitting at work by a lamp-lit table, and wished her good night.
“Did you find Jasper intelligent?” she asked, eagerly.
“Very intelligent.”
“And did you find out all you wanted from him?”
“Not quite all. He told me very little that I did not know before; but there were one or two facts that may be useful. Good night, Nita, good night, and good-bye.”
“Not for long,” she answered. “You will spend Christmas at home, of course.”
“Yes, I shall go home for the Christmas week, I suppose.”
“You will have something to tell me by that time, perhaps. You will be on the track.”
“Don’t be too sanguine, Nita. I will do my uttermost.”
“I am sure you will. Ah, you don’t know how I trust you, how I lean upon you. God bless you, Theodore. You are my strong rock. I, who never had a brother, turn to you as a sister might. If you can do this thing for me—if you can avenge his cruel death——”
“If—what then, Juanita?” he asked, paling suddenly, and his eyes flaming.
“I shall honour—esteem you—as I have never done yet; and youknow I have always looked up to you, Theodore. God bless and prosper you. Good night.”
Her speech, kind as it was, fell upon his enthusiasm like ice. He was holding both her hands, almost crushing them unawares in his vehemence. Then his grip loosened all at once, he bent his head, gently kissed those slender hands, muttered a husky good night, and hurried from the room.